NAME

vmware-user - GUI tool

SYNOPSIS

vmware-user

DESCRIPTION

vmware-user is a relatively small Gtk application that should run for
the duration of an interactive X11 session. It has no dependencies on
X11 service daemons (e.g., messaging buses), and so it may be launched
at any time during or after session startup.
It's a hidden window application and handles tools features which we
want active all the time, but don't want to impose a visable window on
the user.
Without a running vmware-user process, interactive X11 sessions will
lack GUI features such as drag-and-drop (DnD), file and text
copy/paste, dynamic display resizing, and Unity.
vmware-user depends on a mounted vmblock(9) filesystem for proper host
to guest DnD operations.
Drag-and-drop operations depend on a setuid wrapper,
vmware-user-suid-wrapper(8).
A recent change to the Open VM Tools adjusted the nature of the
relationship between the VMware Tools service (vmware-guestd(8)) and
the VMware user process (vmware-user). The two programs have been
completely decoupled, and as such vmware-guestd(8) no longer attempts
to automatically start and stop vmware-user processes on users' behalf.
Modern display managers implementing the XDG autostart spec support
launching applications at session startup via placing a
`vmware-user.desktop' file in a well-known location
(/etc/xdg/autostart).

HOMEPAGE

AUTHOR

Open VM Tools were written by VMware, Inc. <http://www.vmware.com/>.
This manual page was put together from homepage materials by Daniel
Baumann <daniel@debian.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by
others).